Machine learning salaries
We are quickly approaching a full year of The Lindahl Letter here on Substack. That event will happen on January 21, 2022. A partial year seems like a short period of time, but in the world of machine learning so much has happened. Advancements in large language models alone are enough to really move things around in the machine learning space. Part of the ubiquitous nature of machine learning models happens in the marketplaces and how they are freely shared online. Both of those things have changed machine learning salaries. You have to consider the differences between the top level builders at a company like OpenAI and the more practical applications of machine learning separately. The distribution of machine learning salaries in that case is a bimodal distribution.
Over at Indeed you could pretty quickly see that the average salary for a machine learning engineer right now is $140,107.[1] Last week I shared that the number of machine learning jobs on LinkedIn was currently at 152,352 results.[2] Like anything else you will see variations in salary and really the skills being requested. Anybody that tells me they are a full stack machine learning engineer always catches my attention. It’s an interesting thing to say out loud. Some skills around building machine learning models and adapting them to new use cases are highly specialized. In some ways it is more art than science and that part of the equation is what probably causes some of the very large variability in machine learning salaries. You can take a look back to a wonderful New York Times article from 2018 where they discussed some artificial intelligence researchers at OpenAI and the salaries they were making.[3] Let’s just say that the salaries are enough to make anybody late to the party question why they did not attend earlier. Getting a million dollars a year for conducting research is awesome. You would think based on known intersection of technology and modernity more examples of this type of pay would exist.
I spent some time looking for other examples of massive machine learning salaries and really found a lot more examples in the ranges that are shared publicly on Indeed and LinkedIn via simple searches. It looks like you have a strongly bimodal distribution of a small cluster of million dollar salaries or something within that ballpark and then a much larger cluster of salaries that are going to fall under about 250 thousand dollars a year. My assessment here is that over time we will see this bimodal distribution continue and the people who are at the forefront of the future technology curve are going to get paid at a much higher rate. The general democratization of practical machine learning is going to bring the rest of the group back in line with common salary ranges in the information technology space which will drag the mean salary down from $140,107 by around 20% unless resource demand surges.
Links and thoughts:
“[ML News] Cedille French Language Model | YOU Search Engine | AI Finds Profitable MEME TOKENS”
“Apple Can Still Screw This Up - WAN Show November 19, 2021”
“AI Show: Live | Nov 12 | Exciting updates from Managed Online Endpoints from Azure ML | Episode 39”
Top 5 Tweets of the week:
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.indeed.com/career/machine-learning-engineer/salaries
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/machine-learning-jobs/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?
Week 45: Prompt engineering and machine learning
Week 46: Machine learning and deep learning
Week 47: Anomaly detection and machine learning
Week 48: Machine learning applications revisited
Week 49: Machine learning assets
I’ll try to keep the what’s next list forward looking with at least five weeks of posts in planning or review. If you enjoyed reading this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend.